Do you get tired of me saying that a book changed my life?
Well, tough noogies, cuz this one did it again.
A few chapters in, I breathed this prayer. “Thank you God for joy.” I thought I had this whole book figured out. It was about life without happiness. The story (and forgive me, it’s a bit hard to explain) is about a boy named Jonas. Jonas lives in what can ironically be described as a ‘planned community”. Everything is decided for you. Everyone is obscenely polite. Everyone does what they are supposed to do. (There’s a lot more to it but I want to experience it via the author and not by my clumsy retelling.)
All the kids in the community receive their career assignments at age 12. Jonas is assigned to be the new keeper of memory. That person holds all the memories for the community. And he (the giver) starts to transfer those memories to Jonas. At first Jonas is getting really good memories. He sees color for the first time. He experiences snow. He learns the word ‘love’. And then he has to start receiving the bad memories. He relives war, and death, and pain, and hunger and loneliness.
And that’s when it hit me. Without pain, there is no joy. Once Jonas begins to receive the memories, he realizes that all the emotions he thought he had before were just shallow imitations of the real thing. And that is just a hard reality, isn’t it?
The community has no passion. Couples are matched and they marry. But they don’t have a marital relationship. They don’t divorce, which sounds kinda awesome. They don’t fight, which also sounds great. But they also don’t have any physical relationship. And sure, that eliminates the whole adultery problem. But it also eliminates the whole ‘your husband grabs you in the kitchen and kisses you like he is serious about the deal’ situation also. I gotta tell ya. I am not willing to give that up. And admitting that means that I am saying that the joy of my relationship with my husband now is worth the cost of the pain from my former marriage.
And so as I finished The Giver, I breathed a different prayer. “Thank you God for the pain.”
